On Wings of Chaos (Revenant Wyrd Book 5) (34 page)

She watched the sorcerer near the door. She screwed her eyes shut, and held out her hands, willing her wyrd out, to harm the man, to steal his wyrd. Angelica felt her wyrd slip from her body, down her arms, out her hands like waves of water, oozing from her flesh. She opened her eyes, sure she was doing something, but her hands just glowed. Her wyrd didn’t know how to respond.

“What are you doing?” Jovian asked, tossing a glance her way before shooting another bolt at those gathered below. “I think the wyrders will tire before long,” he said offhandedly. She noticed the strain around his eyes. They had all been working themselves to the max the last few days.

“I can’t get it to work!” Angelica said, shaking her hands, as if the problem lay there.

“Well you better hurry, Angie, he’s getting close.” Jovian changed his attack to the sorcerer, trying to distract him from his current course. The sorcerer turned to look at them, and raised his hands.

“Dear Goddess,” Jovian said. “It’s not the doors he’s going to attack.”

Angelica had a moment to react, pulling Jovian to the floor before darklight wyrd licked across the surface of the keep like seeking tendrils from beyond the Black Gate.

“Will the keep hold?” Jovian asked.

Angelica looked behind her at the window, but it was gone, vanished. The wall held, though. There was a commotion in the common room. She started crawling toward the door leading out into the adjoining chamber.

“Everyone alright out there?” Angelica asked.

“Yea,” Shelara said. “Thanks to Caldamron’s fast reflexes. The window’s gone, though.”

“What about Grace?” Jovian called.

“We’re here,” they heard her faint response from Joya’s chamber.

Angelica crawled back to the window, watched the seeking threads of wyrd lick over the surface of the keep. “Why isn’t the keep vanishing?” she asked Jovian.

Her brother shrugged. “Maybe it has something to do with protective wyrd?”

It was Angelica’s turn to shrug. She couldn’t really focus on what her brother was talking about, because she couldn’t stop thinking about the archers and the wyrders higher up in the keep that were being struck by the darklight tendrils and how they were winking out of existence one by one.

But then there was a huge clap of thunder that shook the entire keep on its foundations and the courtyard was lit with a blast of darklight.

Mag ducked out of the way as a bolt of darklight raced up to the top of the keep, where she held position on the parapets just beneath the offices of the Realm Guardian. There had been a sorcerer there with her. One moment he had been there with Mag, readying another attack, and the next, he was simply gone, without a trace that he had ever been there to begin with.

She closed her eyes and began to pray. It was something she hadn’t done in a long time. Given her past, Mag didn’t feel right about praying, like the Goddess was judging her, snickering whenever the former alarist chose to talk freely to her. But this time she needed to pray, needed to let the Goddess know what she was about to do, or attempt to do, wasn’t who she was anymore. Mag only did it to keep the people in the keep safe.

And then she gave in to the voices in the back of her head that she hadn’t heard in ages. It was surprising how quickly the perverse language of chaos swam to the forefront of her mind, infusing her brain with its unknowable chanting. She felt it slither through the folds of her mind, caressing her wyrd like a lover.
No,
Mag thought,
not at all like a lover. More like bugs.

She shivered, but didn’t shirk away from the feeling as she had the very first time the grigori had conjured the link to Arael in her mind. In time she had given herself completely to the power of the alarist, basking in the feel of chaos in her mind, like a companion who lurked within her subconscious.

The power of the darklight was like a drug to her, one she had backed away from ages before. And now she was going back to it, pledging herself, even if for a time, to the power she had refused to touch for many years now.

But I’m doing it for good,
she argued with herself. But it didn’t matter, her mind was made up. She had already called the power to her, and it was inside of her now, filling her up, waiting for release. All this arguing with herself wouldn’t stop it from coming; it had already come. Second-guessing herself would only make her working weaker.

Mag screwed her eyes shut, listening to the screaming of the people around her. Some of the screams suddenly stopped, and she knew they were now echoing beyond the Black Gate, inciting bloodlust in whatever terrors lurked there.

She hardened herself, dropped her shields, knowing that darklight couldn’t exit them, and stood. She held out both of her hands, focused her intent on the sorcerer below, and let the wyrd loose.

She heard the myriad of tortured screams in her head as the darklight bolt left her joined hands. It was thick, like the trunk of a tree, and connected her hands to the ground, right where the sorcerer had been. His darklight stopped abruptly. And then a loud clap of thunder resounded all around them.

And snow began racing down from the peaks of the mountains again.

The chaos dwarves seemed to know what the sound was before the humans did. It was a rushing sound like water cascading down a steep surface. They began to flee, but not all of them would make it. As snow flooded the courtyard and continued down the slope of the mountain, the dwarves were picked up like pebbles in a waterfall, and they tumbled and flew down the slope, riding the frozen wave. Many were dashed to death on the stones and outcropping of rocks as they passed, and yet others spilled uninjured back where they had made camp.

Even more were buried under the first onslaught of snow that had fallen. The doors of the keep were unbarred, and soldiers flooded in to the entrance hall.

Mag sagged against the parapet, snow cascading down the lower part of the keep. She didn’t have any fears now of being rushed off the tower — there didn’t seem to be as much snow up on the peaks after their last avalanche, but it was enough to give them a small reprieve from the dwarves and the trolls.

Annbell sat beside the chief of the giants, Torchef, in an elegant cave in the highlands of the Realm of Earth. Whenever she visited the giants, she was amazed at their grace, their splendor. Many tales of giants got them confused with trolls. Giants were thought to be monsters of creatures, tall, thick, lumbering, and crude. While that was true for trolls, the only truth it held for Giants was their height.

They were slender, graceful if a little clumsy from their height, and well-learned. Their homes resembled nothing of the caves they were built within, often being carved into more permanent rooms, rather than rough rock chambers. Murals were painted on their walls, fireplaces built into their walls, artful carvings adorning their pale wooden furniture, and their cups and plates were formed of colorful rock.

If it wasn’t for the fact that giants were wary around other races, Annbell would insist on living in the highlands with them year-round. But their wariness came from fear of their height, and how fragile smaller races were.

Giants stood four to five times taller than a tall human, and often didn’t think about where they were setting their feet when they walked, giving no mind to things lower than them. Animals knew to get out of their way, as humans would learn to. But if they were integrated into human society, it would spell disaster for the humans, who would live in fear of being crushed, and the giants, who were kind-hearted creatures and wouldn’t want to live with the grief of killing their human allies.

But contrary to the giant’s more artistic nature, they knew how to defend against war, and war is what the trolls brought to them now. Annbell knew the battalion of trolls that attacked were nothing more than a distraction for what was going on lower in the realms.

Annbell had forgotten how much wyrd went into the lives of the giants. They didn’t use wyrd to fight — thinking it a gift of the Great Stone Mother, they used it instead to create, just as she had used it to create them. They wouldn’t use a power so reverent to take life, only to create. And so nearly everything that stood in the chamber around Annbell had been created with giant skill, augmented by wyrding ways.

Torchef sat beside her on the floor, and though Annbell sat in a chair, one sized for a human, which they kept around for her visits, the chief towered over her still. Above the round stone table that could easily sit a hundred people wavered a wyrded screen of sorts, displaying the war that was drawing to an end outside.

“Did I ever tell you how the trolls came to be?” Torchef asked. His voice vibrated through Annbell. Though he spoke softly, his timbre was all bass.

“No,” Annbell said. Her chair made her feel like a child, even though she was tall among the humans. In order to reach the table, they had made her chair tall, only accessible by a ladder they had built into the side. It was either climb to the top, or have a giant lift her up every time she came here, and Torchef refused to degrade the Realm Guardian in such a way. She sat her dainty cup on the table. Annbell-sized, they called the things they made for her and Sara. The chair was Annbell-sized, and so was the cup.

“When the world was still young,” Torchef started. “The Great Stone Mother desired a race of her own. She was lonely in her confinement in the highlands. For many years she lived here alone, treading the highlands, talking to herself, talking to the animals, the trees, the sky, even talking to stones. In her loneliness, she found a stone the size and weight of what she imagined a baby would be, and carried it with her, tending to it like she would a child, caring for it, swaddling it against the frigid winter winds, and even putting it to rest at night in a cradle she had fashioned with her own hands.

“Great Stone Mother didn’t realize the amount of wyrd that went into her actions, and first thought she was losing her mind when the rock began taking on features that we giants now have: a nose, a mouth, ears and eyes. When the rock first cried, Great Stone Mother thought she had gone mad completely.”

Annbell’s eyes found the mural on the wall of the chief’s chamber. The scene was laid out before her, a giant of a woman, crouched over a crib, tending to a lump of rock swaddled in furs. The light of the fire cast golden shadows on the wall. The artwork was so lifelike Annbell almost thought she could see the image move. She looked at her cup again, not sure if the heavy brew of the giants was creating the illusion in her mind, or if the artistry was really that grand.

“When she realized what power she possessed, she created another, and then another,” Torchef told Annbell. “In time she had created an entire tribe out of stones from all around the highlands. In pairs she took them and left them where she had gathered them, and so the family tribes of giants were formed.

“But there were some who turned their back on the Great Stone Mother, and gave their souls instead to Chaos. They lost the way of the earth that the Great Stone Mother gave to us. They turned their wyrd to destruction, rather than creation.

“Do you know who the Great Stone Mother was, Annbell?” Torchef said.

“I don’t,” Annbell told him, gazing down at her hands.

“Baba Yaga,” he said simply.

Annbell recoiled at the name, but settled herself quickly so as not to offend her host. She had heard of the hag before, and there were as many stories about her as there was wonder at what she really was. Some said she was a fairy turned hag. Others said she was a giant, and still more said she was an angel. The story that stuck out most in her mind was of the great forest hag who traversed the night in a giant mortar with a pestle as an oar, gathering children to take back to her hut and turn into stew.